Hair Raising

It's time to do away with public Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Sonia Sotomayor spent the entire week giving perfunctory, noncommittal answers to rehearsed questions from senators trying to please their base. Everyone was playing not only to their strengths, but to the cameras as well. This has been standard procedure for roughly twenty years, after Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork expressed honest, learned and intellectually stimulating though fundamentally repugnant views about jurisprudence and got his nomination handed back to him in the form of a rejection. Since then, these hearings have been all about talking a lot an saying nothing . . . on both sides of the table. (The Clarence Thomas hearings were the exception to this post-Bork posturing, but for all the wrong reasons.)

At one point, one senator - I believe it was Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter - asked Sotomayor the one interesting and original question of the hearings. That was whether she, as a Supreme Court justice, would recommend television cameras used in the Court's proceedings. Great - more denigration of the Court. The Court is already trivialized by some of the cases they've handled, references to the justice as the "Supremes" (as if they were a pop group), and Clarence Thomas's mere presence on it. Do they have to have televised proceedings? Do we want to see Chief Justice Roberts play to the cameras? Televised courtroom proceedings are vulgar; they're voyeuristic, creepy, and overblown, as anyone who remembers the O.J. Simpson murder case or has ever watched Court TV on other occasions knows.

To image how the Supreme court would function on C-SPAN, just consider Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the Senate, and how wonderfully they've worked. We need less, not more television coverage of our judicial system. When the interpretation of the law is at stake, we need public servants to talk to each other, not to a TV audience crying to be pandered to.

So I suggest we stop televising Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings. And when they get behind closed doors, then Amy Klobuchar lets her hair hang down . . . oh, wait a minute, I'm getting this confused with a Charlie Rich song . . . anyway, when they get behind closed doors, then Amy Klobuchar, Jeff Sessions, Patrick Leahy, John Cornyn and all the rest can ask someone like Sotomayor all the relevant questions they should ask - and the nominee can actually give honest answers - all without the distraction of live TV.

One good standard has survived the Bork hearings, however. Someone in my family (I won't say whom) complained about Sotomayor's appearance and said she should have gotten her hair done. Gee whizbangers, she's trying for a Supreme Court justiceship, not a movie role! I'm glad Supreme Court nominees don't physically make themselves over, just as Bork rejected advice to shave his beard. We don't want judges, lawyers, and the rest spending more time on personal appearances than on cases. After all, Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark gave as much time to preparing her hair as to her case, and look how that turned out.